Being John McLaughlin is the clever name for the local ad-hoc sextet tackling the phenomenally complex, combustible, and beautiful music of 1970s jazz-fusion deities Mahavishnu Orchestra. McLaughlin is, of course, MO’s superhumanly dexterous guitarist/leader and one of the catalysts in Miles Davis’s paradigm-shifting electric period. His group’s first two albums— 1971’s Inner Mounting Flame and 1973’s Birds of Fire—remain overwhelming sources of quicksilver inventiveness and spiritual profundity (go to “The Noonward Race” for instant proof) on the level of those early Tony Williams Lifetime LPs, Miles’s Dark Magus, and Return to Forever’s Romantic Warrior.